Democrats Karen Bass, Nithya Raman face off in the Los Angeles mayoral election
Councilmember Nithya Raman is seeking to unseat Mayor Karen Bass in November's general mayoral election, pitting former allies against one another for the top job in the nation's second-largest city.
In an election that each candidate has called their last race, Councilmember Nithya Raman looks to regain ground against Mayor Karen Bass and unseat the incumbent, a feat that hasn't happened since 2005.
While polling placed Bass far behind Raman a month before the election, a survey from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and the LA Times released late last month showed the race had become a neck-and-neck matchup.
Polling data placed Bass far behind Raman a month before the election. But an Oct. 28 survey from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and the Los Angeles Times showed that the race turned into a neck-and-neck matchup, with Raman and Bass each with 40% support among likely voters.
In late September, a survey from the same pollster showed 39% of likely voters backing Raman, compared to Bass with 28%.
Since emerging as the top two candidates in June, the pair of former allies have been vying for the 218,000 voters that rallied behind third-place candidate Spencer Pratt during the primary election.
While Bass had an edge among Pratt voters in that September poll, the survey showed that 63% weren't sure who they would vote for.
In the week before the election, even more of Pratt's primary voters shifted their support to Bass, with her share jumping to 41%, up from her previous 22%.
"A lot of the voters who were previously supporting Spencer Pratt in the primary have now weighed in, and they have moved to Bass," said Mark DiCamillo, director of the Berkeley IGS poll.
In contrast, Raman saw a slight drop among Pratt supporters, falling from 16% in September to 14% in October. However, the new poll showed that a large contingent of Pratt voters, 45%, remained undecided on the candidates.
"Will they actually vote? That's really the question," Dicamillo said. "The polling does show Pratt supporters don't really have a good impression of either candidate."
Berkeley pollsters said that roughly 19% of the electorate remained undecided, according to the Oct. 28 Berkeley IGS-LA Times poll.
Mayor Karen Bass
After serving the better part of two decades as a congresswoman and LA's 43rd Mayor, Bass said this race will be her last campaign for public office after more than two decades as an elected official.
Raised in LA with her three brothers, Bass began her professional career as a nurse and physician assistant. She founded the Community Coalition to help underserved residents of South LA battle substance abuse, poverty and crime.
She started her career in politics in 2004 as a member of the California Assembly, where she became the first Black woman to serve as Speaker of a state legislative body. She left the Assembly in 2010 to run for Congress, where she served in the House for 12 years.
Leading up to the primary, Bass received endorsements from Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Vice President Kamala Harris. Nearly a week before the November election, billionaire Rick Caruso threw his support behind his former rival in the 2022 mayoral race and vowed to vote for her in November.
"For the love of LA, I must put the past behind me because this election must be about our future," Caruso said in a post to X. "I will be casting my ballot for Mayor Karen Bass."
He also said in the video that he had concerns about Raman that were not "much about ideology, but about competence."
Bass said she hopes to convince undecided voters, including the remaining 45% of former supporters of Pratt to back her.
"They have somewhere to go and they can come right over here," Bass said in October. "In fact, I have been talking to plenty of Pratt voters who are very concerned at the direction that the city would go under a Raman leadership."
During her four-year term, Bass has faced an onslaught of critical tests of leadership, including the Hollywood labor strikes in 2023, the Palisades Fire in 2025, increased immigration enforcement operations and the ongoing homelessness crisis in the city. All of these complex issues have impacted the local economy, which came to a head last year when the city faced a $1 billion shortfall.
"Voters typically have a short-term memory," said Sara Sadhwani, a politics professor at Pomona College. "However, the Palisades Fire and the mismanagement around both the emergency and the recovery continue to stay front of mind for voters."
Bass said she plans on earning voters' trust back by delivering on her promises to help LA recover from the disaster.
"We have a thousand homes that are under construction right now," she said. "People are beginning to move back. When I hear of roadblocks or problems within the system, we address them immediately."
Despite the challenges, Bass has celebrated her administration's achievements, noting that she worked to avert layoffs during the budgetary crisis and reduced the number of unhoused residents.
While homelessness dropped in 2024 and 2025, the effort to curtail the crisis suffered a setback in 2026 when the number of unsheltered residents increased.
Bass defended her efforts to combat the crisis, saying that her office has helped 85,000 people avoid eviction and moved tens of thousands of people into interim housing.
She attributed the increase in homelessness to a 50% cut to state funding, which stripped the city of $70 million, and the Trump administration inflating the cost of living.
Councilmember Nithya Raman
Raman, a Democrat, announced her surprise bid for mayor in February after previously endorsing Bass' reelection bid.
"Los Angeles is at a breaking point, and people can feel it in the most basic ways," Raman said in her campaign announcement. "The city gave me and my husband so much, but today, I fear that the city is no longer a place of opportunity for too many."
During the primary, Raman called her campaign a "long shot" before ultimately overtaking Spencer Pratt to face Bass in the general election.
"I'm running like I'm down," she said, framing her mayoral bid as an underdog campaign. "A huge number of voters are still undecided. I think a lot of them voted for Spencer Pratt in the primary. I want Pratt voters to hear from me directly: If you're feeling frustrated about the direction of our city, so am I."
Before being elected to Los Angeles City Council in 2020, Raman served as the co-chair of the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council Homelessness Committee and co-founded a homeless advocacy nonprofit.
On her City Council website, Raman says she ran for office in the Fourth District — which stretches from Griffith Park to parts of Hollywood, Studio City, Sherman Oaks and Encino — because she wanted to fill the "gap" she saw in LA's homelessness response. She defeated incumbent David Ryu in 2020 and was reelected in 2024, fending off a challenge from Deputy City Attorney Ethan Weaver.
In an April interview with CBS LA, Raman described herself as an "urban planner by training" with a master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"We saw a 49% reduction in unsheltered homeless individuals living on the streets of my district in just one year, this past year," Raman said during a CBS LA interview leading up to the runoff election.
One of her most notable acts in office came in 2025, when she introduced a motion capping maximum annual rent increases for tenants in rent-stabilized apartments built before 1978. It eventually passed 13-2. She said she hopes to undertake similar work to help small businesses.
"I want to make sure that we're investing in our commercial corridors, better trash pickup, better homelessness response, better repairs for things like broken street lights," Raman said.
Raman said she believes that Bass has been unable to properly address homelessness in the city.
"I've tried to partner with the mayor's office. I've hit a wall. I've hit a wall of inaction, a wall of a lack of responsiveness to the most urgent issues that are facing Los Angeles," Raman said during her interview with CBS LA.
Raman's own approach to homelessness has been scrutinized during her two terms. Fellow Councilmember Traci Park criticized Raman's vote to block an anti-encampment ordinance in Venice in April.
"You'd think addressing a known homeless encampment tied to drugs and crime would be a common sense unanimous vote, but it isn't always that easy," Park said in a video posted to Facebook.
In a statement, Raman said she believes encampment bans only shift the homeless population and are not a viable long-term solution.
Bass has said Raman lacks experience, blasting her former ally after a social media video featured the candidate and progressive influencer Ed Choi saying in unison, "only you can stop fascist liars," as a photo of Bass appeared on screen. Choi has taken down the video.
In a statement, Raman's campaign denounced the video and stated the candidate "never used that phrase" to describe Bass, LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell or LAPD officers.
Raman said this will be her last political campaign if she does not win the mayoral election.
"I want to make sure that we can trust city hall again and I want to go out there and restore that faith," Raman said.
